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Measuring Direct vs Indirect Paths, an Initial Prototype

In thinking about the sketch 1 assignment, which is to create a performance that looks at direct vs indirect space, I’ve been thinking about how measure in/directness. The following example images come from a live demo in HTML5/Javascript I made yesterday. Drag your mouse around to see the last 30 or so points your mouse moved. The intuition behind the metric is to measure the predicability of the path. For each point, I try to predict the next 5 steps by assuming the actual path will continue in the same linear predicted path. The following screenshots show a various paths and a scale from 0 to 100 of in/directness.

Here, the green path shows the actual mouse path. Each red line is the predicted path at a point. The more often the red path matches the green path, the more direct the path is.

One can imagine using a Kinect or Wiimote to generate this path. Once that is accomplished, interactive visualizations and sonifications can be mapped to this metric.